Given the sheep industry’s well documented problems, labelling yourself specialist sheep farmers might not be considered the most inspiring of titles, but it is one the Alderton family wears with pride.

They are living proof sheep farmers can make money and be profitable by balancing business, animal and environmental factors.

You would think it a brave man who told a new farmer-supplier with 30,000 lambs that his lambs weren’t really up to scratch. That farmer might be tempted to tell the meat company to take a running jump – but to Ren Apatu, managing director of Ngamatea Station, 28,000ha of wild tussock and improved high-performance pastures on the Napier-Taihape road, the comment was a seminal moment.“We thought we were pretty clever, with that number of lambs, but the meat company said, ‘If you give us lambs like last season we really don’t want them’ – and we really hadn’t heard that before,” Ren says.Even more of a revelation was being taken into the chiller and shown his lambs on the hooks, next to those of other farmers.“There were our lambs, about 16kg with a big fatty pack of meat on their rumps, hanging next to lambs at about 25kg with no fat on them.”Being told “this is what we want and this is what you guys are giving us and if you want to be a part of it you need to supply what we want” was a wake-up call to Ren.“We were told – ‘Our markets don’t want fat, they want meat; we want high yield as well – its good for us and for you’.” . .

Craig Norgate is well gone from PGG Wrightson, but tidying up some of the messes created during his tenure seems to be taking time – and may involve a reasonable bill.

Here’s what the progress card to date looks like:

1. New Zealand Farming Systems Uruguay exited – a good outcome, sold above book but below cost, with a bonus $4 million for the management contract and a $19.2m receivable debt owed to PGGW due to be settled.

2. Tim Miles, the former managing director put in place by Mr Norgate has been ejected – but at what cost?

3. Fixing up the half-cocked exit from the wool business and associated creative accounting – work in progress.

New chairman Sir John Anderson comes with one of the finest reputations in New Zealand business, and certainly there seems to be decisiveness around the board table in terms of the sudden and immediate resignation of Mr Miles, who was rightly or wrongly seen as Mr Norgate’s right-hand man.. .

Sustainability’s a term that’s a bit like ‘beauty’ – everyone knows what it is, but pinning down exactly what it is, is often in the eye of the beholder.

However, NZ agribusiness better start getting a better grip on the actuality of sustainability, or risk being marginalised by overseas customers and consumers according to KPMG.

In a recent agribusiness green paper KPMG lays out the current and emerging environment in our markets on the vexed issue of sustainability, with a second paper to focus on the practicalities of implementing such a supply chain approach.

The report contends that while the term has broad meaning, in essence it is about meeting the needs of today, without adversely impacting on the needs of tomorrow, and in balancing environmental, social and economic concerns in doing so. . .